Give your eyes 20 minutes
Night vision builds slowly. Arrive early, keep lights low, and let faint stars appear before judging the sky.
Stargazing Forecast
Location loaded
Will tonight's sky be worth it?
Enter a place for a 0 to 10 stargazing score based on tonight's clouds, moonlight, darkness and true dark hours.
How dark is your exact viewing spot?
Choose the spot you’ll actually stand in. You can change this after searching.
Stargazing score
Search a place or use your location to load tonight’s score.
Clouds--
Darkness--
Moon--
Window--
Best US national parks for stargazing
The table starts with US parks and NPS units with verified dark-sky certification. Expand it to include additional parks where the certification status or scoring inputs are estimated.
| # | Park | State | Certified | Bortle | Clear nights | Score |
|---|
Before you go stargazing
Small choices that change what you see
A great forecast helps, but the last few metres matter too. These quick checks can make the difference between a washed-out sky and a memorable night.
Dim your phone before you arrive
Turn on red tint or the lowest brightness in advance. One bright screen can reset your eyes for several minutes.
Check what the moon is doing
A bright moon can hide the Milky Way even in a dark park. New moon weeks are usually best for deep-sky views.
Watch the cloud trend
Patchy clouds can clear after sunset. If the score is borderline, look for whether cloud cover is improving overnight.
Pack for standing still
Stargazing feels colder than hiking. Bring a layer, water, and a blanket or chair so you can stay out longer.
Step away from direct lights
Even at a dark site, car parks, cabins and headlamps can spoil the view. A short walk can unlock a much darker sky.
Methodology
How the score works
No black box. For your location we read tonight's cloud cover, the moon's brightness, how dark your spot is and how many truly dark hours you get, then weigh them into a single number you can trust.
- Clouds carry the most weight, so a clear night beats everything else. We look at the forecast for the dark hours specifically, not whatever it happens to be doing right now, which is why a clear evening still scores well after sunset.
- Your viewing-spot picker sets how much light pollution sits over the exact place you will stand. A city centre washes out all but the brightest stars, while a dark-sky site shows thousands more.
- The moon's brightness comes from its phase, worked out right in your browser with no lookup. A bright moon costs you points, and we ease off when the moon has already dropped below the horizon.
- The dark window is how long the sky stays genuinely dark after twilight. When you are online we pull tonight's exact twilight times, otherwise we estimate them from your latitude and the date. Near midsummer at far-north latitudes the sky may never fully darken, and we say so plainly rather than show a misleading number.
The parks ranking
How parks are ranked
Each park's rank blends site darkness with how often nights run clear, then scales the result to 0 to 100. Darkness carries about two thirds of the score and clear-night reliability carries about one third, so a very dark park with reliable skies rises to the top.
- Certified means the park or NPS unit appears in DarkSky International's certified-places programme, or is matched against NPS night-sky material. The certification year is treated as verified only when we can identify it from those sources.
- Bortle darkness is established from the park's certification status, published night-sky descriptions, remoteness from major light domes, elevation, and known regional sky quality. When a park-specific measured value is not published, we mark the Bortle value as (est.).
- Clear nights are established from regional climate patterns and desert, mountain, coastal, or eastern-forest sky reliability. Where there is no published park-level clear-night percentage, we use a transparent regional estimate and mark it as (est.).
- The default table keeps the highest-confidence certified set first. The additional-parks view is useful for inspiration, but it mixes in units where one or more inputs still need stronger source confirmation.
- Download the CSV to see every value, including which ones are estimated.
Sources. DarkSky International certified-places registry, NPS Night Skies program, Open-Meteo for the forecast, sunrise-sunset.org for twilight times, and Sky & Telescope for the Bortle dark-sky scale.
A forecast of a chaotic sky is odds, not a promise. Always check a current local forecast before you drive out.